


Enough

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [70]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Anxiety, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Insecurity, Literal Sleeping Together, Nightmares, Nighttime, Protective Loki (Marvel), Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24531544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: Your brain takes to torturing you with nightmares about Loki leaving you--because why wouldn't he? Loki finds a way to comfort you.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [70]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 9
Kudos: 201





	Enough

When darkness crept in, it crept _all the way_ in. You thought you’d mostly managed to overcome those awful self-doubts and issues with self-esteem when you were a teenager, but lately the world seemed to be perfectly set up to rekindle those things. With all the stress and fear and uncertainty, those mean thoughts just seemed to pop up out of nowhere, and it was easier than usual to believe them.

Loki being here with you made things...complicated. On the one hand, it was hard to believe that you were stupid and useless when he regularly looked at you with such tender affection in his eyes. When he touched you—a brush of his hand here, a light sweep of his fingertips there, always _always_ so full of love that you couldn’t refute it—it was hard to believe that you were hideous and unworthy. But on the other hand, you _knew_ he shouldn’t be here. Regardless of how poorly his father had treated him, he was royalty. He was meant for greatness. He should be ruling somewhere with his every desire perfectly catered-to by people who adored him. But he was here. On Earth. In a tiny little apartment with a _human_.

That’s where the darkness came in. As soon as your brain started going back to its old patterns, the nightmares started up. They all followed, more or less, the same basic plot line. You’d be somewhere with Loki: sometimes in your living room, sometimes in a beautiful flower garden, sometimes just on a corner of a street somewhere. You’d talking with or touching one another, just enjoying the togetherness, when suddenly his face would go cold and he’d straighten his back. He’d use a cool, royal voice—one that he never used with you in real life—and tell you that he’d found a way home, and he was leaving forever. Your brain would let you try to sputter out some kind of response, maybe a halfhearted plea for him to take you with him, and then he’d laugh without humor and pat your head. And then, each time, a flash of light would white out your surroundings and when it cleared, Loki was gone.

Sometimes he left as the result of a fight, and hot tears would burn down your cheeks as you screamed into the nothingness. Sometimes he looked sad to leave you. Most of the time he seemed pleased. Every time you woke up from one of those nightmares, your insides felt all twisted-up and wrong. There was nothing wrong about what he said or did. It was never anything that you, yourself, didn’t think about him. But you still felt remnants of that hollow, selfish ache inside you at having lost him, at having been abandoned. Usually, you turned so that you were facing away from the real Loki sleeping peacefully beside you and closed your eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

You weren’t enough. It seemed laughable and even arrogant to try to convince yourself otherwise. He teased you about your mortality sometimes, poking fun at your fragile human body even as he ran his hands along your skin like he was trying to memorize you. If your body was so weak compared to him, how could your mind ever measure up? Maybe, for him, talking to you was like talking to a child. Or a pet. You frequently had what felt like deep conversations with him, talking about the world and humanity and philosophy and a wide array of other things. Those conversations had a way of exhausting you—what if, to him, they were nothing more than banal small talk? As the darkness started to pull you under, it seeped into your dreams as well. In your dreams, Loki began to sneer at you. He called you stupid and childish and boring. You started waking up from those dreams with wet cheeks.

Now, you understood that your nightmares were your own doing. You didn’t blame the waking-Loki for the things your mind made him do at night. But it was hard— _extremely_ hard—to keep from pulling away from him when the words continued to echo in your mind. He noticed the change in you, because he _had_ to notice the change in you, but for a long time, he didn’t bring it up.

You started asking him questions about Asgard. You would try to keep your cool, try to sound wholly nonchalant when you asked about traditions and royal marriages and nobility and education. He said all the right things. He knew you well enough to answer honestly, you hoped, and his voice always held a certain level of distaste for whatever it was that he was describing. Your traitorous brain told you that you heard a hint of wistfulness. Maybe it was like the fable of the fox and the grapes: stranded here with you, where all the trappings of his early life were and would remain entirely out of reach, he had to try to convince himself that he didn’t want them anyway. Sour grapes. 

You stopped asking about his home.

The dreams kept getting worse. 

One night, it was especially horrific. It was hard to know exactly where you were, because it was just darkness. You could hear a howling wind somewhere in the distance, but nothing stirred around you. Loki turned away from you, paced back and forth like a wild man, and ignored your quiet pleas to tell you what was wrong. When he did finally snap out of it, it was only so that he could spin to face you, swooping in too close so he loomed over you. You had to tilt your head backwards to look at him. 

He became the voice in the back of your mind. His beautiful, melodic voice spat out every last horrible thing you’d ever thought about yourself. Boring. Stupid. Lazy. Ugly. Weak. His face became almost unrecognizable as rage twisted his features. You reached for him and he smacked your hand away. You tried to whisper his name and he raised his voice to drown you out. Unlike many of your other nightmares, in this one, you tried to fight for him. You wouldn’t be deterred, trying to touch him and shouting to be heard over him as you pleaded with him to stay. You begged him to tell you what you’d done, what you could do to make it better, but he just started to laugh at you. 

He disappeared in a flash of light and the stillness and the darkness pressed in even closer around you.

“Hey.” It was Loki’s voice. Perhaps the real Loki? He didn’t sound angry anymore. If anything, he sounded upset. You drew in a shaky breath and forced yourself to open your eyes. There he was, your Loki, hovering above you and watching you with wide eyes. The difference between this beautiful man and the demon in your nightmares was so startling that you had to close your eyes again. Your face was wet with tears. Of course it was. You tried to raise your hands to wipe them away and cover your face, but he grasped your wrists lightly and pulled them away. In a moment, you felt his cool touch on your face as he wiped the tears for you. Another sob wracked through you. “What is it, pet? You were shouting as though to wake the dead.”

“What was I saying?” You asked the question before you could decide whether you really wanted to. Maybe you wanted to ignore it. If you didn’t know exactly what he’d heard, you were more likely to be able to convince yourself that he hadn’t heard anything. Something like guilt flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t look away.

“You were calling for me. Asking me to listen to you. Begging me not to do something. Was I hurting you?” Once again, the open pain in his face at the idea of that was so far removed from the hatred and disgust you’d seen in your dream that you only cried harder. Your Loki—the _real_ Loki—was so different from the one who said such horrible things to you. Didn’t he deserve someone who knew him better than you clearly did? He murmured your name, sounding close to tears himself, and slid his arm around your back so he could pull you in for a hug.

His arms around you gave you strength. The knowledge that he was not looking at you gave you courage. Your sleepiness and disorientation did away with any of the arguments _against_ telling him that you might have been able to come up with. So you told him everything. Interspersed with desperate apologies, you told him what your brain was making him do at night. “I know it’s not you,” you choked out. You never wanted to become the kind of girl who blamed her partner for things that happened in dreams. “Loki. I _know_ it’s not you. I’m sorry I’m so stupid.”

He was quiet for a long time. You felt him slip one hand beneath your shirt so he could press his fingers against the overheated skin of your back. He traced abstract designs into your skin, and the familiarity of that helped you regain some control over your breathing. When he tried to pull back, you weren’t ready to let him go, and kept a tight grip on him to hold him in place. He gave in.

“I had no idea.” His voice was deep in the night. Thoughtful. You did your best not to sniffle into his shoulder. “My darling. My love. None of that is true. I want you to know that I have never so much as entertained the thought of _thinking_ those kinds of things about you. You are so hard on yourself. If I’d known the depth of it, maybe I would have worked harder to convince you.”

You wanted to pull away then, so you could protest that that wasn’t his job, but he must have read your mind because he pressed his hand against the back of your head to keep your face tucked into his shoulder. You felt him kiss the side of your head.

“For the first time in a long, _long_ time, I feel at home here. Every single time that I show you some new and awful part of myself, you accept it without question. You have no idea how miraculous you are. You take in parts of me that made my mother recoil, and you don’t even know what that means to me. You simply do it like it’s never occurred to you _not_ to. And there’s a part of your brain which thinks I could ever leave you?” The words sounded like an admonishment, but his tone was gentle. 

“I know. I’m sorry.” Your voice cracked as you spoke, but you were already so fucked up that you didn’t bother to conjure up any more embarrassment. “I know it’s stupid. I love you so much.”

“That’s another thing.” He laid you back down again and pulled away so he could continue to hover above you. You wanted nothing more than to hide your face, but he wouldn’t let you. “You are _not_ stupid. I have never once thought that about you, and I would go to battle against anyone else who dared. You are one of the wisest people I have ever known, love. Talking to you never fails to challenge me. You make me think harder. You make me reconsider things I have known all my life. Do you realize that sometimes when you’re half-asleep in my arms, you mumble things that are more eloquent and thought-provoking than things that I have heard or read?”

Okay, that was certainly an exaggeration. You squirmed a little beneath him, trying to decide whether it was worth it to try to call his bluff, but ultimately you decided that it’d look too much like you were digging for more kind words. He must have seen the discomfort in your face, because he smoothed one hand along your forehead, along your cheeks. 

“I would sooner cut out my own heart than leave you. I would bite out my own tongue before I said any of those things to you.” They felt like the right words, but his voice burned with sincerity. He wasn’t just saying them. “If someone were to try to drag me away from you, my love, they would have to come equipped with several armies, because I would lay waste to all of them without a second thought. Tell me you believe me.”

Of course you did. Imagining him hurting himself like that, or facing down scores and scores of enemies, it hurt your heart, but you didn’t doubt for a second that he was telling you the truth. Because he always told you the truth. 

You nodded, but he kept his eyes fixed on you. He wanted the words. You swallowed hard around the lump in your throat and told him. “I believe you. Of _course_ I believe you.”

“Good.” He was speaking quietly now. He moved to the side and turned to face you with his head propped up on his hand. With the moonlight streaming in and caressing the planes of his body, he looked like a painting. But he still gazed at you with adoration. He reached out with his other hand to smooth down some of your hair, and then caress your cheek. “Now I just need to convince the rest of your brain, so it will stop tormenting you so. I will not leave you. The idea of living without you is worse than the idea of living without skin, or without bone. You are too deeply embedded in the fabric of my being. You have become more important to me than my body. I will work harder to show you that.”

You opened your mouth to protest again—because _your_ nightmares should not produce more work for _him_ —but he pressed his thumb to your lips and smiled at you. When he leaned in closer to you, he nuzzled your nose and then rested his forehead against yours. The easy affection in his movements made your eyes sting again, but in a far more welcome way. After a moment, he lifted his head again to kiss you. His lips were soft and sweet and hungry.

Neither of you slept for the rest of the night.


End file.
